A new earthquake-sensing app just hit the Google Play Store

Based on the data, scientists can automatically alert other phones within the earthquake’s impending path in less than a second, notifying people of the magnitude of the quake.

Allen announced the MyShake project Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

SAN FRANCISCO – at University of California, Berkeley, released Friday an application, or app, on the Android platform in an effort to turn smartphones into a seismic detection network. With enough phones networked together, researchers hope they can build a kind of distributed seismograph, stitching together thousands of rough readings into a more comprehensive data source than researchers have ever had. It will briefly activate the phone’s Global Positioning System and send information on time, amplitude of the shaking, and the phone’s Global Positioning System coordinates only when the handset’s accelerometers detect motion that fits an natural disaster profile.

The folks over at UC Berkeley are hoping people download the MyShake Earthquake app, which can give them data about earthquakes from your phone.

A denser network of app-equipped phones would yield a network capable of detecting an quake faster and better, Kong says. What smartphones lack in sensitivity – they can only record earthquakes above magnitude 5 within 10 kilometers (6 miles) – they make up for in ubiquity. Nepal and Peru, for example, are prone to earthquakes but have no comprehensive seismic network. While smartphones will never replace these more sensitive terminals, Allen said the app could complement and strengthen the existing technology. With an eye to retaining users, the scientists worked with Silicon Valley Innovation Center, part of Deutsche Telekom, to design the app to use as little memory and battery power as possible.

“Generally when we push out warnings, we want them to go over every media that we can come up with”, says Allen.

The app records accelerometer data continually, and after a confirmed natural disaster will also send five minutes of data to the researchers, starting one minute before the quake and ending four minutes after. “What he’s proposing, properly tuned, could be as good as a standard early warning system with established networks”. An iPhone version is planned. “In most cases these phones can only detect very strong parts of shaking, not the early portion of the wave”, Kong says.

A ground-based early-warning network called ShakeAlert is now being developed and tested with hundreds of traditional seismic stations in California and the Pacific Northwest. So this version won’t issue alerts just yet, Allen says. That’s what researchers at the University of California-Berkeley are trying to do with a smartphone app. The app, called MyShake, is available on the Google Play store and runs on minimal power in the background, so users will hardly even know it’s there. “Usually within a 110-by-110-km area and [with] more than 300 smartphones, we could make a relatively accurate estimate of location, magnitude, and origin time”.

Once the app has proven reliable, quake detection could trigger an alert to cellphone users outside ground zero, providing users with a countdown until shaking arrives.